On Blocking Shawls

(Pasteur's Laboratory circa 1885, Musée Ville de Paris)

Interesting what one can find in a laboratory. In my case, knitting supplies.
See this tube of surgical stainless steel rods? Once they'd have been packaged individually and autoclaved by a scrub nurse for repairing bad fractures, fixing the pieces of bone together (something I unfortunately know about first-hand, now having a cyber-ankle due to a bad fall. But I digress). These days they come more specialized, individually wrapped, already sterile and ready to use.
When my lab moved from floor A to floor B, we found all kinds of odds and ends (I'm in a surgery department). Odds and ends come in handy I've found, since I've had to build some of my own apparatus over the years, so I collect them just in case. The other day I came across this tube of rods and thought, Blocking Wires. With 3 lace shawls on the needles at the time, you can see how blocking might possibly be on my mind.

So these appear at a fortuitous time. I finished the pink Shetland Triangles lace shawl for my little niece the other night. It'll be a slightly late birthday present. Let's try these rods as blocking wires. (Soaks shawl, prepares foam blocks, pins, wires, and towel).
Verdict: Bit thin and bendy for a fingering-weight shawl but could be perfect for laceweight and lighter shawls. Fortunately, I also have a blocking wire kit, so out came that.



Much better. These are stiff enough not to be distorted by the shawl so it can dry straight. Seriously, for knitting lace especially, blocking wires cannot be beat. When I blocked sister-in-law's shawl, I was too lazy to dig my set out of the very back of the closet. Lazy is relative, as it turns out, since the time spent pinning and repinning was more than the time I would have spent rummaging in the closet, zipping a wire along the back and another down the center. The steel wires I found should work for pinning out the points of Evenstar. Maybe not all the points, but enough of them to get the shape and dimensions right.
I've never knit a circular shawl before Evenstar, so naturally I've never blocked a circular shawl before. Now that the final clue is here, I need to plan blocking it being it will be 5 feet across when completed and DH, despite being a doll about most things, doesn't think our bed is a good place to block it. He's willing to help me block it on the floor, but my back has other ideas. We shall see when the time comes.
Happy Mother's Day to all.

Knitting Knews

That's what's been keeping me from blogging, the Evenstar shawl. I am done with Clue 5; there are only 2 more clues to go. At nearly 600 stitches per row, it takes about a half hour to do one row. Especially since I count each repeat and each motif inside each repeat. May be slow and may be a bit boring but it's kept me from major screw ups while knitting this shawl.

I would recommend being this compulsive to anyone embarking on a complex lace pattern. The sanity you save may be your own. The other bit of advice I have is to use a good, grippy rubber band (I'm using one from my hair stash) on the ends of the circular needles, to prevent loss of stitches while the project is away. The fancy doo-dads they sell I've heard have a tendency to jump off tiny lace needles at inopportune moments. From what I've read on the Ravelry boards, stitches on complex lace projects have a finite chance of migrating or wandering while the knitter is off doing non-knitterly things. The more complex the lace, the higher the chance that the stitches will wander off the needles according to the formulae:

where z* = complexity of pattern and tau* = patience of knitter to reknit the thing, D being number of stitches the knitter will have to pick up times the number of rows dropped to get back to where the knitter was. Easier to stick a rubber band on the ends.

Since I was in a picture-taking mood, and my boat-load of pins (for blocking Evenstar) came, I decided to take a better photo of the lovely budding lace pattern that is the main part of Swallowtail:

Such a gorgeous little lace pattern! Makes up for the drawbacks of the yarn. You can really see the intriguing Twilight color of the Jamieson's Shetland in the macro. Wonder if adding a bit of hair conditioner to the Eucalan will help it soften.

The Beaverslide Dry Goods yarn and the Miyuki 6/0 beads, came so I can make a pink Shetland Lace Triangles shawl for my little niece, as requested. Just like Mommy's.

Paging Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel

Thursday's New York Times covered Karl Lagerfeld's Chanel show earlier this week. This passage caught my eye:

It was Mr. Lagerfeld’s 54th couture collection for the house, a milestone noted by a man who doesn’t easily observe anniversaries or birthdays. He mentioned the fact only because that’s the number of collections it apparently took him to figure out how to make a dress that doesn’t appear to have seams.

Making a seamless dress was a goal of futurists like Rudi Gernreich and Issey Miyake, and, no, Mr. Lagerfeld didn’t quite succeed. But at least he thought about it. The method he used requires four hours of handwork to cover a length of two inches, but the effect of flat, random stitches on pastel wool bouclé dresses and jackets was successful enough to make the seams appear magically erased.

Pastel wool bouclé. Any bouclé for that matter. In other words, yarn. We knitters know how to make seamless garments, n'est-ce pas? M Lagerfeld, je peux vous tricoter les chemises sans sutures!

In other (knitting) news, I have finished Sleeve #1 of Milkshake. Voilà!

I took the photo right before completing it. It has a strange sleeve cap: all decreases from the armhole. Quite different from the body shaping.

And I did more work on the Shetland Triangle shawl:
This shawl pattern is nice and easy; I don't think my next shawl project Evenstar will be this relaxing. Speaking of which, I ought to start swatching for it soon. I plan to use the JaggerSpun Zephyr 2/18 I have in stash (I have nearly a pound of it, that's over 5,000 yards). Plenty for mistakes, frogging, tinking, and any other disaster I can think of. No joining either. And a pretty dark maroon color (maybe dark is good for hiding mistakes?). This will be my first circular shawl. It'll be an adventure. Maybe not on the order of Frodo's and Sam's; here's hoping it won't feel as if I descended into Mordor!

Book Report Time Again

My other two books finally came, Wrap Style by Pam Allen and Ann Budd, and Knitting Lace Triangles by Evelyn Clark.

First the rap on Wrap Style. It has gorgeous pictures, clear instructions, but few items I want to knit. Most of them are short tight wraps or capelets, not shawls or larger wraps. I bought it primarily for Evelyn Clark's Shetland Triangle Shawl pattern, though Norah Gaughan's cabled capelet and Nancy Marchant's brioche stitch wrap have me itching to get my needles and worsted wool stash out (no pun intended; I'm OK with most wools, though Shetland wool right next to my skin makes me turn red). I'd make both of these longer though. There are general directions for designing your own capelet, but in general this book leaves me underwhelmed. Page numbers are hard to see: turned sideways and printed in light green ink. Not being spiral bound, I'm having a hard time keeping pages open to the charts I need, and the charts are small to begin with. We'll see how long it takes up valuable shelf space after I knit the shawl and maybe a capelet or two. Recommendation: Buy it if you love the patterns or foresee the need to knit wraps and capelets.


On the other hand, Knitting Lace Triangles is a strategy for, well, knitting lace triangles into shawls or scarves, and includes general directions for knitting the same Shetland shawl as in Wrap Style (though the lace pattern is called something other than fir cone lace in Clark's own book). I like the spiral binding, allowing you to lay it flat as you knit. The charts are very clear and large. The instructions are quite good (that's true of most of Clark's patterns; I was able to knit her sock patterns as a sock neophyte). She gives several methods for starting a lace triangle, and I find that to be invaluable. In the back she gives information on approximate required yardage for several yarn weights. This is great for using up stash yarn. Since she planned the triangles in multiples of 10 rows, it's easy to modify sizes by knitting more or fewer 10 row repeats. if you want to add beads to the points of your edging, there are close-up photos and clear instructions for that too, and the chart in the back tells you about how many beads you need, whether you add 1 or 3 beads per point of edging. If you're getting into lace knitting, this book is pretty good to have. It's not as advanced as other lace knitting books, so you won't be frustrated and will complete your project. The edging is completed on the shawl, rather than casted on separated and then knitted to the shawl; I think this is easier for lace neophytes (at least for this one). Recommendation: A good book for lace neophytes or the geometrically-challenged to own.

To put theory into practice, I used a cast-on from Knitting Lace Triangles to start the Shetland Triangle shawl. I'm using Beaverslide Dry Goods light sport in Whitetail Fawn from stash and size 5 needles (6 would probably be a bit better but my size 6 needles are claimed by other WIPs; oh well). The garter tab at the base of the neck and the first 20 row pattern for the neck are complete:

BTW, this is my first time knitting with BDG light sport, previously I'd only knitted with the heavy worsted-weight yarn. Opinion? Lovely yarn but when I wound all 440 yards into one center-pull skein and tried to start the skein from the center, it snapped. So I'm unwinding from the outside as I knit. It's not plied (it's 1-ply), so joining may be slightly visible if I add another skein. It's called light sport, but fingering weight may be more accurate; it's described on the site as a 20 wpi yarn, 6-7 stitches per inch on a size 2 to 4 needle. I had bought it initially for a pair of socks, but even non-knitting DH (my human swift, who observed the snapping of the center strand) remarked that the yarn is not strong enough for socks. I agree. I think it's great for lace though. And I love the color. Moreoever, the yarn has some mohair and therefore isn't real slick. I think that will be an advantage as the number of stitches grows on the needles. There's a one pound cone of it in this color on sale on the website right now.

Front and back of Milkshake are done. Even after blocking, the back of Milkshake looks pathetic. I'm going to take out the big guns, er steam iron, and see if I can't flatten those seams better.
Pathetic-looking, right? Wait 'til I take the iron to it.

OTOH, Carefree is looking more like something. Lovely depth to those staggered cables, just love them.

I'm on Ravelry!

I've been invited to join Ravelry, and that's been a lot of fun posting my projects on and seeing who else is making/made the same thing or who else is stashing as much Magpie as I've been. To check it out, go here.

Check out the 3 hats I finished up for the Ships Project. I redid the red part of the slip stitch striped one (it has the vertical stripes); the red on that one is Beaverslide Dry Goods wool/mohair, otherwise the rest of the yarn is Rowan Magpie.




I'm still not a huge fan of doing color knitting; cables and texture and lace will always hold sway in my heart. But I can almost conceive of doing a real Fair Isle project one day. Lord knows I've spent enough time drooling over AS' colorways and I do love color, especially her use of color.

I must have some second sock syndrome; I'm nearly done with the second watermelon sock (past the gusset and about halfway up the sole) and just am not interested in working on it. And I"m nearly done with the Baby's Breath socks I started out of Meilenweit (the pattern is by Jeanie Townsend; her website is called Just Me Jeanie). Instead, I started Evelyn Clark's Lupine socks out of a skein of Sundara sport merino in Blue-Violet over Cotton Candy. This is so much fun to knit; I like her sock patterns a lot. Think there's an Evelyn Clark Sock Pattern fan club out there somewhere. I'll have to join.

My Kate Spades came into the optician's last week. DD#2 says they look better on me than the old Escadas; DD#1 says they look modern, unlike the Escadas. So why do I miss my old Escadas, which didn't even fit as well as the Kate Spades, so much?